South Carolina is offering free genetic profiling that does a full sequence and gives you health information and ancestry. My wife shared it to me and waited for me to go off about handing that information over to the government.
I didn’t even blink before saying let’s do it. Privacy is an illusion. Anyone that wants my DNA can get it by grabbing a discarded cigarette butt. The police do need warrants because they can just buy whatever information they want on you.
In the open source software movement “information wants to be free”. That applies to personal private information too.
When I went to the doctor about getting vasectomy they asked “Are you sure you don’t want to have any children?” “I decided at 13 that I should never have children. I knew that a 18 no doctor would touch me. I’m now 40 and you can’t argue with me.”
My wife made the same choice when she was 24. There will be no children. We have covered that on both ends.
And that’s where you and I disagree. Just like there’s a difference between public and private property, there’s a difference between public and private information.
Curious on the implementation. For example apps like signal and WhatsApp require you to either move or lose your data when you get a new phone. This will have to be the way Google implements or they are storing it somewhere on their servers.
I guess the catch is the fact that they don’t really need it. They have real time location from any Android device anyways (because of that feature that sends the lists of wifi networks around you from time to time), no need to storage the timeline on their servers, it’s only duplicate data. lol
I use it to make documentation easier for work. I have to log visit times, travel time and mileage for each patient I visit. So much easier to pull up the info of my phone after work than to remember to track miles and log time getting in and out of my car.
Well, there is a “solution” in the works. It’s currently not required for my position and will only initially apply to Medicare (or Medicaid - don’t recall which) patients.
The hospital provides field staff with cell phones. There’s an app we’re just getting training on that will time stamp our visits, travel, and mileage, as well as track GPS for verification of visits. It will also flag and ask for clarification if travel time exceeds expectation.
Currently we self report, so if I stop at McDonald’s because I have to pee, it’s nobodies business. Many of my coworkers are less than thrilled with the new app (honestly most aren’t that fond of tech or changes to begin with) even though management is attempting to reassure that they’re really not intending to track us, it’s just for patient verification (for the very small percentage of patients it applies to.)
As much as I’m careful about Google keeping my data, I have to recognize that this has helped a friend tremendously. He was separated from his ex, she had left with their daughter, and he was trying to get split custody. She testified he was a deadbeat dad, and she put it in writing that he had never been to pick up their daughter at school, never taken her to her regular weekend club activities, etc.
He reached out to me asking if his location history could help prove she was full of shit. It took me an hour or so to figure out the right way to process the data, but then I was able to give him a detailed list of dates and times he had been to his daughter’s school, poney club, etc. His lawyer attached that to their rebuttal. I like to think it made a significant difference. He did get joint custody in the end.
Seems unlikely, GPS data is far more accurate and lots of security minded m people turn off WiFi when away from home but still need gps when out and about
Social engineering. The more information they have about you, the easier you are to immitate.
The threat isn’t in any one piece of information about you; it’s in the corpus of knowledge, the profile they can build. Your tastes in music - at the granularity of not only what you listen to, but how much, and at what times - can help narrow down:
how old you are
where (in the world, and maybe to the time zone) you live
your mother tongue
probably your socio-economic status
These are just the things I can tyink of off the top of my head, and I’m not in infosec.
Depends on how much you let them link it back to you, but you’re absolutely right: social media is a privacy nightmare. It can be mitigated; pick a Lemmy instance that doesn’t require an email, and don’t give out any identifying information, or just lurk. Many of us have multiple accounts on different servers, with carefully segregated personas. You do what you can; OP asked why (or why not) scrob. I see no reason to give out that information, only to give a company more information they can sell.
Because music charts are valuable because the music industry is valuable? They give me free access to their API and they get to scrape the data. It’s not incriminating data, it’s not GPS data. It is, at best, an unreliable indicator of when I am awake.
In totalitarian countries, those who listen to certain types of music are persecuted, because it links them with demografic that can be threatening to the regime. Even if your country is not totalitarian now, the existence of this data could be potentionally harmful to you in the future (just like any data, really).
So long as they’re totally de-identified (not linkable to people), this is a good thing. Image a GPT that can diagnose you 10x as accurately as a human and 1000x faster. This can revolutionize medicine.
Generally, data science is evil and so is Google, but this needs to be done.
Privacy is a personal thing. Everyone does it for their own reasons. For me, I’m just sick of wading through adverts, targeted outrage and my details being sold to every company under the sun for profit so I cut down on every opportunity for those companies to harvest that stuff.
As far as governments go, I’m not sure anything I say or do is remotely of interest to them so it matters less to me on a personal level, but I also appreciate that people like whistle-blowers, activists, abuse survivors and journalists do care about those things so I fully support any measures that help support them.
From pixel tracking, to WebRTC leaking your real ip, fonts fingreprinting, canvas fingreprinting, audio fingerprinting, android default keyboard sending samples, ssl certificate with known vulnerabilities
All those things have ways of being tackled to some degree or other. Depending on your browser, WebRTC leakage for example is either a setting or an extension away.
My model is more about the ability to surf the web without SPAM coming at me from all possible sides and avoiding services like Google Drive, iCloud etc not much because of the data privacy aspect but more because I don’t to become hostage of one of those companies because they’ll decide to charge more and/or lock me out of my account without any way to get back to it.
Doing things like self-hosting, using ungoogled chromium, LibreWolf and a bunch of the extensions listed by others fixes the “SPAM and hostage issue” with the added bonus of some privacy.
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